Friday phalanges: Megaraptor vs. Saurophaganax
April 19, 2013
Is that your flexor tubercle, Saurophaganax, or are you just hungry to see me?
Up top there is a commercially obtained cast sculpture of a thumb claw of Megaraptor. Down below is an unpainted urethane cast of one of my favorite inanimate objects in the universe: OMNH 780, a thumb claw of Saurophaganax. I dunno how much of the Megaraptor claw is real [none, it turns out, but it's based on a true story]; certainly the cast is faithful enough to record some tool-marks in the rugose part near the base. But I know how much of OMNH 780 is legit, and that is all of it. I would have put in a photo of the actual specimen but irritatingly I forgot to take any during my recent visit, and I didn’t have the Megaraptor claw back then anyway. Hopefully I’ll get back to the OMNH this summer, and then it is ON.
The kaiju-loving fanboys of CarnivoraForum undoubtedly want to know how these two compare. Well, much to my disappointment, the Megaraptor claw is a shade longer (28.7 cm max straight-line distance) than the Saurophaganax claw (26.3 cm). But the Saurophaganax claw is about twice as thick and way more robust, and the flexor tubercle which anchored the tendon that powered the claw’s movement is friggin’ immense. It’s like pitting an NBA forward against an NFL linebacker: one is a little taller, but the other one will pound you like a tent stake.
If anyone’s wondering, these claws are both waaay shorter than those of Therizinosaurus (half a meter and up), which still holds the longest-claws-of-anything-ever title. The problem for fans of excessive violence is that Therizinosaurus probably wasn’t doing terribly exciting things with its claws–grooming its feathers, making veggie kabobs, and scratching its ample behind, most likely.
Mmmmmm…suffering. OM NOM NOM NOM!!
The same was not true for Saurophaganax, which the unbelievers call Allosaurus maximus, a red-blooded all American murder machine with a triple PhD in kicking your ass. When it wasn’t drinking camptosaur blood straight from the jugular, it was eating mud-mired diplodocids butt first while they were still alive. And what about those rumors that Saurophaganax was completely feathered in $100 bills, or that it was the direct linear ancestor of Charles Bronson and Steven McQueen? It’s probably too soon to say, since I just made them up, but I’ll bet your mind is blown nonetheless.
How dangerous was Saurophaganax? Let me put it this way: it’s still dangerous. Thanks to the high concentration of heavy elements in Morrison dinosaur bones, you’re supposed to air out the specimen cabinets before you start working so the radon can escape. Otherwise you might breathe in freakin’ radioactive gas and get cancer (in contrast to some “facts” in the previous paragraph, this is actually true). That’s right, Saurophaganax can kill you, just by lying around in a drawer. After 145 million years, it’s still reaping souls for Hades. By god, that’s giving them what for!
In short, the thumb claw of Saurophaganax is the most impressive instrument of dinosaurian destruction I’ve yet laid eyes on. If you want to see it in context, check out the mounted skeleton at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman.
This idiot is going to die.
Night at the Museum: LACM’s Camp Dino
April 8, 2013
Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when they were–very atypically–almost empty. Above are the museum’s mounted Triceratops–or one of them, anyway–and mounted cast of the Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype, presented in glorious not-stygian-darkness (if you went through the old dino hall, pre-renovation, you know what I mean).
We got there early and had time to roam around the museum grounds in Exposition Park. The darned-near-life-size bronze dinos out front are a minor LA landmark.
The rose garden was already closed, but we walked by anyway, and caught this rainbow in the big fountain.
After we checked in we had a little time to roam the museum on our own. I’ve been meaning to blog about how much I love the renovated dinosaur halls. The bases are cleverly designed to prohibit people touching the skeletons without putting railings or more than minimal glass in the way, and you can walk all the way around the mounted skeletons and look down on them from the mezzanine–none of that People’s Gloriously Efficient Cattle Chute of Compulsory Dinosaur Appreciation business. Signage is discreet and informative, and so are the handful of interactive gizmos. London and I spent a few minutes using a big touch-screen with a slider that controlled continental drift from the Triassic to the present–a nice example of using technology to add value to an exhibit without taking away from the real stuff that’s on display. There are even a few places to sit and just take it all in. That’s pretty much everything I want in a dinosaur hall.
Also, check out the jumbotron on the left in the above photo. It was running a (blessedly) narration-free video on how fossils are found, collected, prepared, mounted, and studied, on about a five-minute loop. Lots of pretty pictures. Including this next one.
There are a couple of levels of perspective distortion going on here, both in the original photo and in my photo of that photo projected on the jumbotron. Still, I feel confident positing that that is one goldurned big ilium. I’m not going to claim it’s the biggest bone I’ve ever seen–that rarely ends well–but sheesh, it’s gotta be pretty freakin’ big. And apparently a brachiosaurid, or close to it. Never mind, it’s almost certainly an upside-down Triceratops skull. Thanks to Adam Yates for the catch. I will now diminish, and go into the West.
Triceratops, Styracosaurus, and Einiosaurus–collect the whole set!
Of course, the centerpiece of the second dinosaur hall–and how great is it that there are two!?–is the T. rex trio: baby, juvenile (out of frame to the right), and subadult. Yes, subadult: the “big” one is not as big as the really big rexes, and from the second floor you can see unfused neural arches in some of the caudal vertebrae (many thanks to Ashley Fragomeni for pointing those out to me on a previous visit).
Awwwww! C’mere, little fella!
Still, this ain’t Vulgar Overstudied Theropod Picture of the Week. Here are some sweet pneumatic diplodocid caudals in the big wall o’ fossils (visible behind Mamenchisaurus in the overhead photo above). The greenish color is legit–in the Dino Lab on the second floor, they’re prepping a bunch of sauropod elements that look like they were carved out of jade.
Sudden violent topic shift, the reason for which will be become clear shortly: London and I have been sculpting weapons of mass predation in our spare time. In some of the photos you may be able to see his necklace, which has a shark tooth he sculpted himself. Here are a couple of allosaur claws I made–more on those another time.
The point is, enthusiasm for DIY fossils is running very high at Casa Wedel, so London’s favorite activity of the evening was molding and casting. Everyone got to make a press mold using a small theropod tooth, a trilobite, or a Velociraptor claw. Most of the kids I overheard opted for the tooth, but London went straight for the claw.
Ready for plaster! Everyone got to pick up their cast at breakfast this morning, with instructions to let them cure until this evening. All went well, so I’ll spare you a photo of this same shape in reverse.
We were split into three tribes of maybe 30-40 people each, and each tribe bedded down in a different hall. The T. rex and Raptor tribes got the North American wildlife halls, but our Triceratops tribe got the African wildlife hall, which as a place to sleep is about 900 times cooler. Someone had already claimed the lions when we got there, so London picked hyenas as our totem animals.
Lights out was at 10:30 PM, and the lights came back on at 7:00 this morning. Breakfast was out from 7:15 to 8:00, and then we had the museum to ourselves until the public came in at 9:30. So I got a lot of uncluttered photos of stuff I don’t usually get to photograph, like this ammonite. Everyone should have one of these.
London’s favorite dino in the museum is Carnotaurus. It’s sufficiently weird that I can respect that choice.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the old standards, especially when they’re presented as cleanly and innovatively as they are here.
Finally, the LACM has a no tripod policy, and if they see you trying to carry one in they will make you take it back to your car. At least during normal business hours. But no one searched my backpack when we went in last night, and I put that sucker to some good use. Including getting my first non-bigfoot picture of the cast Argentinosaurus dorsal. It was a little deja-vu-ey after just spending so much time with the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus–elements of the two animals really are very comparable in size.
If you’re in the LA area and interested in spending a night at the museum–or at the tar pits!–check out the “Overnight Adventures” page on the museum’s website. Cost is $50 per person for members or $55 for non-members, and worth every penny IMHO. It’s one of those things I wish we’d done years ago.
The poor man’s CT machine
March 26, 2013
Another raw photo from the road.
The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper. (Feel free to take a minute if you need to get your nausea under control.) And whereas most Morrison fossils are much darker than the surrounding matrix, in the Oklahoma panhandle the bone and matrix are about the same color. Sometimes the prep guys didn’t know they’d gone too deep until they sanded into the trabecular bone. Or in this case, into the air spaces in the condyle of this anterior dorsal of Apatosaurus.
Still, we have lots of anterior dorsals of Apatosaurus, and very few we can see inside, and they’re too darned big to scan, so this gives us useful information that a more perfect specimen would not. So I salute you, underemployed dude from eighty-odd years ago. Thanks for showing me something cool.
OMNH 1331 is my new hero
March 24, 2013
Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception).
Here’s OMNH 1331. It’s just the slightly convex articular end off a big vertebra, collected near Kenton, Oklahoma, in 1930s by one of J. Willis Stovall’s field crews. I measured the preserved width at 45 cm using a tape measure, and at 44.5 in GIMP using the scale bar in the photo, which is up on a piece of styrofoam so it’s about the same distance from the camera as the rim of the vertebra (i.e, about 8 feet–as high as I could get and still shoot straight down). So whether your distrust runs to tape measures or scale bars in photos, I am prepared to argue that this sucker is roughly 45 cm wide.
There’s admittedly not a ton of morphology here, but the size and the fact that the other side is hollow and has a midline bony septum show that it is a pneumatic vertebra from a sauropod, and given that the quarry it’s from was chock-full of Apatosaurus, and liberally salted with gigantic Apatosaurus, I feel pretty good about calling it Apatosaurus.
To figure out how wide the articular face was when it was intact, I duplicated the image and reversed it left-to-right in GIMP, which yields an intact max width of about 49 cm. That is friggin’ immense.
If we make the maximally conservative assumption that this is the largest centrum in the whole skeleton of a big Apatosaurus, then it has to be part of a dorsal vertebra. Here are the max diameters of the largest dorsal centra in some big mounted apatosaurs, taken from Gilmore (1936). The number in parentheses is how many percent bigger OMNH 1331 is.
- A. louisae CM 3018 – 36.5 cm (34%)
- A. parvus UWGM 15556 – 36.5 cm (34%)
- A. sp. FMNH P25112 – 41 cm (20%)
However, this might not be part of a dorsal vertebra. For one thing, it’s pretty convex, and Apatosaurus dorsals sometimes have a little bump but they’re pretty close to amphiplatyan, at least in the posterior half of the series. For another, I think that smooth lower margin on the right in the photo above is part of the rim of a big pneumatic foramen, but it’s waaay up high and pretty medial on the centrum, opening more dorsally than laterally, which I have seen a lot in anterior caudal vertebrae. Finally, Jack McIntosh went through the OMNH collections years ago and his identifications formed the basis for a lot of the catalogue IDs, and this thing is catalogued as the condyle off the back end of a proximal caudal.
Here are the max diameters of the largest caudal centra in those same mounted apatosaurs, again taken from Gilmore (1936). Once again, the number in parentheses is how many percent bigger OMNH 1331 is.
- A. louisae CM 3018 – 30 cm (63%)
- A. parvus UWGM 15556 – 32.5 cm (51%)
- A. sp. FMNH P25112 – 39 cm (26%)
(Aside: check out the skinny rear end on A. louisae. ‘Sup with that?)
So whatever vert it’s part of, OMNH 1331 is damn big bone from a damn big Apatosaurus. There are lots of other big Apatosaurus vertebrae in the OMNH collections, like OMNH 1670, but OMNH 1331 is the largest centrum that I know of in this museum. Which is why you’re getting a post about most of one end of a centrum in the wee hours of the morning–it’s most of one end of an awesome centrum. And it pains me when people do comparison figures of big sauropod vertebrae, or lists of the “Top 10 Largest Sauropods”, and put in stuff like Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus and Supersaurus, but leave out Apatosaurus. It was legitimately huge, and it’s time the world realized that.
For more on the giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus, see:
Reference
Gilmore, C.W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11:175-300.
Neural spine paper: new file available
March 16, 2013
Figure 7. BYU 12613, a posterior cervical of Diplodocus or Kaatedocus in dorsal (top), left lateral (left), and posterior (right) views. It compares most favourably with C14 of D. carnegii CM 84/94 (Hatcher, 1901: plate 3) despite being only 42% as large, with a centrum length of 270 mm compared to 642 mm for C14 of D. carnegii.
The original version of the PDF of our new paper (Wedel and Taylor 2013) had a couple of obvious errors: Kaatedocus was misspelled in the caption to Figure 7 (as Kaatedocu), and the submission date was given as June 24, 2012, not the correct date of June 14. Both of these errors were introduced during the editorial handling, so I politely asked if they could be fixed, and thanks to the kind offices of the folks at PalArch, now they have been. However, to avoid confusion (or perhaps propagate it, depending on your feelings), the corrected PDF has a different filename. The original version will continue to be available at:
and the corrected version (with an extra ’1′ on the end of the filename) is at:
Two things:
- I will go around changing the links here and elsewhere (FigShare, etc.) to the new version, but I probably won’t have time today, as I have an all-afternoon community outreach at the local public library to help organize.
- I realize that some people, including possibly my coauthor, will hate this because now we have created some uncertainty about which is the version of record. So we’re not going to ask for any more changes, no matter how egregious the errors we find (and we are certain to find a few more, that’s just the nature of the beast); as far as I’m concerned, the second corrected version is the final version. Also, the changes made are tiny and don’t affect the science at all, so it’s not like we’ve moved any important goalposts here.
If you have strong feelings about this either way, feel free to sound off in the comments.
Our neural spine bifurcation paper is out
March 15, 2013
Figure 4. Cervical vertebrae of Camarasaurus supremus AMNH 5761 cervical series 1 in anterior view, showing different degrees of bifurcation of the neural spine. Modified from Osborn & Mook (1921: plate 67).
Today sees the publication of my big paper with Mike on neural spine bifurcation, which has been in the works since last April. It’s a free download here, and as usual we put the hi-res figures and other supporting info on a sidebar page.
Navel-gazing about the publication process
This paper is a departure for us, for several reasons.
For one thing, it’s a beast: a little over 13,000 words, not counting tables, figure captions, and the bibliography. I was all geared up to talk about how it’s my longest paper after the second Sauroposeidon paper (Wedel et al. 2000), but that’s not true. It’s my longest paper, period (13192 vs 12526 words), and the one with the most figures (25 vs 22).
It’s the first time we’ve written the paper in the open, on the blog, and then repackaged it for submission to a journal. I have several things to say about that. First, it was more work than I expected. It turns out that I definitely do have at least two “voices” as a writer, and the informal voice I used for the initial run of blog posts (linked here) was not going to cut it for formal publication. So although there is very little new material in the paper that was not in the blog posts, a lot of the prose is new because I had to rewrite almost the whole thing.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, last May kinda sucked, because just about every minute that wasn’t spent eclipse chasing was spent rewriting the paper. On the other hand, as Mike has repeatedly pointed out to me, it was a pretty fast way to generate a big paper quickly, even with the rewriting. It was just over two months from the first post in the destined-to-become-a-paper series on April 5, to submission on June 14 (not June 24 as it says on the last page of the PDF), and if you leave out the 10 days in late May that I was galavanting around Arizona, the actual time spent working on the paper was a bit under two months. It would be nice to be that productive all the time (it helped that we were basically mining everything from previously published work; truly novel work usually needs more time to get up and going).
Figure 18. Middle cervical vertebrae of Barosaurus AMNH 6341 (top) and Supersaurus BYU 9024 (bottom) in left lateral view, scaled to the same centrum length. The actual centrum lengths are 850 mm and 1380 mm, respectively. BYU 9024 is the longest single vertebra of any known animal.
You may fairly wonder why, if almost all the content was already available on the blog, we went to the trouble of publishing it in a journal. Especially in light of sentiments like this. For my part, it’s down to two things. First, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, what I wrote in that post was a yell, not a thought. I never intended to stop publishing in journals, I was just frustrated that traditional journals do so many stupid things that actually hurt science, like rejecting papers because of anticipated sexiness or for other BS reasons, not publishing peer reviews, etc. Happily, now there are better options.
Second, although in a sane world the quality of an argument or hypothesis would matter more than its mode of distribution, that’s not the world we live in. We’re happy enough to cite blog posts, etc. (they’re better than pers. comms., at least), but not everyone is, and the minimum bound of What Counts is controlled by people at the other end of the Overton window. So, bottom line, people are at least theoretically free to ignore stuff that is only published on blogs or other informal venues (DML, forums, etc.). If you want to force someone to engage with your ideas, you have to publish them in journals (for now). So we did.
Finally, ever since Darren’s azhdarchids-were-storks post got turned into a paper, it has bothered me that there is an icon for “Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research” (from ResearchBlogging.org), but not one (that I know of) for “Blogging Into Peer-Reviewed Research”. If you have some graphic design chops and 10 minutes to kill, you could do the world a favor by creating one.
Hey, you! Want a project?
One of the few things in the paper that is not in any of the blog posts is the table summarizing the skeletal fusions in a bunch of famous sauropod specimens, to show how little consistency there is:
(Yes, we know that table legends typically go above, not below; this is just how they roll at PJVP.)
I want this to not get overlooked just because it’s in a long paper on neural spine bifurcation; as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important part of the paper. I didn’t know that these potential ontogenetic indicators were all mutually contradictory across taxa before I started this project. Not only is the order of skeletal fusions inconsistent among taxa, but it might also be inconsistent among individuals or populations, or at least that’s what the variation among the different specimens of Apatosaurus suggests.
This problem cries out for more attention. As we say at the end of the paper:
To some extent the field of sauropod paleobiology suffers from ‘monograph tunnel vision’, in which our knowledge of most taxa is derived from a handful of specimens described decades ago (e.g. Diplodocus carnegii CM 84/94). Recent work by McIntosh (2005), Upchurch et al. (2005), and Harris (2006a, b, c, 2007) is a welcome antidote to this malady, but several of the taxa discussed herein are represented by many more specimens that have not been adequately described or assessed. A comprehensive program to document skeletal fusions and body size in all known specimens of, say, Camarasaurus, or Diplodocus, could be undertaken for relatively little cost (other than travel expenses, and even these could be offset through collaboration) and would add immeasurably to our knowledge of sauropod ontogeny.
So if you’re looking for a project on sauropod paleobiology and you can get around to a bunch of museums*, here’s work that needs doing. Also, you’ll probably make lots of other publishable observations along the way.
* The more the better, but for Morrison taxa I would say minimally: Yale, AMNH, Carnegie, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Field Museum, Dinosaur National Monument, BYU, University of Utah, and University of Wyoming, plus Smithsonian, University of Kansas, OMNH, Denver Museum, Wyoming Dinosaur Center, and a few others if you can swing it. Oh, and Diplodocus hayi down in Houston. Check John Foster’s and Jack McIntosh’s publications for lists of specimens–there are a LOT more out there than most people are familiar with.
References
- Wedel, M.J., R.L. Cifelli and R.K. Sanders. 2000. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4): 343-388.
- Wedel, M.J., and Taylor, M.P. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1): 1-34.
Giraffes’ necks are lamentable
March 13, 2013
At the top: our old friend BYU 9024 — the cervical vertebra that’s part of the Supersaurus vivianae holotype. At the bottom, C2 (the longest cervical) of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426.
The Supersaurus vertebra is 138 cm long. We don’t know which cervical it is, but there’s no reason to think it’s the longest. The giraffe vertebra is 31 cm long. Not only is the Supersaurus vertebra four times as long as that of the giraffe, it’s one of more than twice as many cervicals as the giraffe has.
Did we cheat by using an unusually small giraffe? Not really. When we articulated all seven cervicals as best we could, the sequence measured 171 cm, which is a fairly healthy 71% of the 2.4 m neck of the world-record giraffe. It’s not a monster, but it’s a decent-sized adult.
Bottom line, giraffes are just lame.
Brachiosaurus sp. BYU 12866 c5? in left lateral view with CT slices, some corrected for distortion.
Last Tuesday Mike popped up in Gchat to ask me about sauropod neck masses. We started throwing around some numbers, derived from volumetric estimates and some off-the-cuff guessing. Rather than tell you more about it, I should just paste our conversation, minimally edited for clarity and with a few hopefully helpful links thrown in.
BYU 12613, a posterior cervical probably referable to Diplodocus, in dorsal (top), left lateral (left), and posterior (right) views. It most closely resembles C14 of D. carnegii CM 84/94 (Hatcher 1901: plate 3) despite being less than half as large, with a centrum length of 270 mm compared to 642 mm for C14 of D. carnegii. From Wedel and Taylor (in press).
* R. McNeill Alexander (1985, 1989) did estimate the mass of the neck of Diplodocus, based on the old Invicta model and assuming a specific gravity of 1.0. Which was a start, and waaay better than no estimate at all. Still, let’s pretend that Mike meant “tried based on the actual fossils and what we know now about pneumaticity”.
The stuff about putting everything off until April is in there because we have a March 31 deadline to get a couple of major manuscripts submitted for an edited thingy. And we’ve made a pact to put off all other sciencing until we get those babies in. But I want to blog about this now, so I am.
Another thing Mike and I have been talking a lot about lately is the relation between blogging and paper-writing. The mode we’ve seen most often is to blog about something and then repurpose or rewrite the blog posts as a paper. Darren paved the way on this (at least in our scientific circle–people we don’t know probably did it earlier), with “Why azhdarchids were giant storks“, which became Witton and Naish (2008). Then last year our string of posts (starting here) on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods became the guts–and most of the muscles and skin, too–of our in-press paper on the same topic.
But there’s another way, which is to blog parts of the science as you’re doing them, which is what Mike was doing with Tutorial 20–that’s a piece of one of our papers due on March 31.
Along the way, we’ve talked about John Hawks’ model of using his blog as a place to keep his notes. We could, and should, do more of that, instead of mostly keeping our science out of the public eye until it’s ready to deploy (which I will always favor for certain projects, such as anything containing formal taxonomic acts).
And I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time for me–for us–to take a step that others have already taken, and do the obvious thing. Which is not to write a series of blog posts and then decide later to turn it into a paper (I wasn’t certain that I’d be writing a paper on neural spine bifurcation until I had written the second post in that series), but to write the paper as a series of blog posts, deliberately and from the outset, and get community feedback along the way. And I think that the sauropod neck mass project is perfect for that.
Don’t expect this to become the most common topic of our posts, or even a frequent one. We still have to get those manuscripts done by the end of March, and we have no shortage of other projects waiting in the wings. And we’ll still post on goofy stuff, and on open access, and on sauropod stuff that has nothing to do with this–probably on that stuff a lot more often than on this. But every now and then there will be a post in this series, possibly written in my discretionary blogging time, that will hopefully move the paper along incrementally.
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Alexander, R.M. 1985. Mechanics of posture and gait of some large dinosaurs. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 83(1): 1-25.
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Alexander, R.M. 1989. Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants. Columbia University Press.
- Hutchinson, J.R., Bates, K.T., Molnar, J., Allen, V., and Makovicky, P.J. 2011. A computational analysis of limb and body dimensions in Tyrannosaurus rex with implications for locomotion, ontogeny, and growth. PLoS ONE 6(10): e26037. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026037
- Taylor, M.P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
- Wedel, M.J., and Taylor, M.P. In press. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
- Witton, M.P., and Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2271. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002271
How big was the Recapture Creek sauropod?
February 28, 2013
From Jensen (1987, page 604):
“In 1985 I found the proximal third of an extremely large sauropod femur (Figs. 8A, 12A) in a uranium miner’s front yard in southern Utah. The head of this femur is 1.67 m (5’6″) in circumference and was collected from the Recapture Creek Member of the the Morrison Formation in Utah near the Arizona border. It is the largest bone I have ever seen.”
Jensen included not one but two figures of this immense shard of excellence. Here they are:
Jensen 1987, Figure 8
Jensen 1987, Figure 12
The specimen was heavily reconstructed, as you can see from the big wodge of unusually smooth and light-colored material in the photo. So we can’t put much stock in that part of the specimen.
Unfortunately, the only measurement of the specimen that Jensen gives in the paper is that circumference; there are no straight-line linear measurements, and the figures both have the dreaded scale bars. Why dreaded? Check this out:
As you can see, when the scale bars are set to the same size, the bones are way off (the scale bar in the drawing is 50 cm). This is not an uncommon problem. I make the Fig 8 version 30% bigger in max mediolateral width of the entire proximal end, and still 17% bigger in minimum diameter across the femoral head, as measured from the slight notch on the dorsal surface (on the right in this view).
Can we figure out which is more accurate based on the internal evidence of the paper? For starters, the Fig 12 version is a drawing (1), that does not match the outline from the photo (2), and the hand-drawn scale bar (3) does not actually coincide with any landmarks (4), and that’s plenty of reasons for me not to trust it.
What about that circumference Jensen mentioned? Unfortunately, he didn’t say exactly where he took it, just that the head of the femur had a circumference of 1.67 meters. Is that for the entire proximal end, or for the anatomical head that fits in the acetabulum, er wot? I’m afraid the one measurement given in the paper is no help in determining which of the figures is more accurately scaled.
The obvious thing to do would be to see if this bone is in the BYU collections, and just measure the damn thing. More on that at the end of the post.
In the meantime, Jensen said that the shape of the Recapture Creek femur was most similar to the femur of Alamosaurus, or to that of Brachiosaurus among Morrison taxa, and he referred it to Brachiosauridae. So how does this thing–in either version–compare with the complete femur of FMNH P25107, the holotype of Brachiosaurus altithorax?
The Recapture Creek femur fragment compared to the complete femur of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107
The first thing to notice is that the drawn outline from Figure 12 is a much better match for the Brachiosaurus altithorax femur–enough so that I wonder if Jensen drew it from the Recapture Creek specimen, or just traced the B.a. proximal femur and scaled it accordingly (or maybe not accordingly, since the scale bars don’t match).
But let’s get down to business: how long would the complete femur have been?
Using the scale bar in the photograph from Figure 8 (on the left in above image), I get a total femur length of 2.36 meters. Which is long, but only 7.7% longer than the 2.19-meter femur of FMNH P25107, and therefore only 25% more massive. So, 35 tonnes to Mike’s 28-tonne B.a., or maybe 45 tonnes to a more liberal 36-tonne B.a. Big, yeah, but not world-shattering.
Using the scale bar in the drawing from Figure 12 (on the right in the above image)–which, remember, is 50 cm, not 1 meter–I get a total femur length of about 1.9 meters, which is considerably smaller than the B.a. holotype. That is very much at odds with Jensen’s description of it as “the largest bone I have ever seen”, and given that we have many reasons for not trusting the scale bar in the drawing, it is tempting to just throw it out as erroneous.
So it would seem that unless Jensen got both scale bars too big, the Recapture Creek brachiosaur was at most only a shade bigger than the holotype specimen of Brachiosaurus altithorax.
But wait–is the Recapture Creek brachiosaur a brachiosaur at all? Jensen didn’t list any characters that pushed him toward a brachiosaurid ID, and I don’t know of any proximal femur characters preserved in the specimen that would separate Brachiosaurus from, say, Camarasaurus. And in fact a camarasaur ID has a lot to recommend it, in that Camarasaurus femora have very offset heads (the ball- or cylinder-like articular surface at the top end sticks out a big more to engage with the hip socket–see Figure 12 up near the top of the post), moreso than in many other Morrison sauropods, and that would make them better matches for the Recapture Creek femur photo. Here’s what the comparo looks like:
The Recapture Creek femur fragment compared with a complete femur of Camarasaurus.
I make that a 2.07-meter femur using the photo on the left, and a 1.66-meter femur using the drawing on the right. The one decent femur in the AMNH 5761 Camarasaurus supremus collection is 1.8 meters long, so these results are surprisingly similar to those for the B. althithorax comparison–the drawing gives a femur length shorter than the largest known specimens, and the photo gives a length only slightly longer. A camarasaur with a 2.07 meter femur would be 15% larger than the AMNH C. supremus in linear terms, and assuming isometric scaling, 1.5 times as massive–maybe 38 tonnes to AMNH 5761′s estimated 25. A big sauropod to be sure, but not as big as the largest apatosaurs, and not nearly as big as the largest titanosaurs.
I have always been surprised that the Recapture Creek femur frag has attracted so little attention, given that “Dinosaur Jim” himself called it the biggest bone he had ever seen. But it appears that the lack of attention is justified–whether it was a brachiosaur or a camarasaur, and using the most liberal estimates the scale bars allow, it simply wasn’t that big.
Update about half an hour later: Okay, maybe I was a little harsh here. IF the photo scale bar is right, the Recapture Creek femur might still represent the largest and most massive macronarian from the Morrison Formation (Edit: only if it’s a brachiosaur and not a camarasaur; see this comment), which is something. I suppose I was particularly underwhelmed because I was expecting something up in OMNH 1670-to-Argentinosaurus territory, and so far, this ain’t it. I’ll be interested to see what the actual measurements say (read on).
The Moral of This Story
So, if it wasn’t that big after all, and if no-one has made a stink about it being big before now, why go to all this trouble? Well, mostly just to satisfy my own curiosity. If there was a truly gigantic brachiosaur from the Morrison, it would be relevant to my interests, and it was past time I crunched the numbers to find out.
But along the way something occurred to me: this should be a cautionary tale for anyone who gets all wound up about the possible max size of Amphicoelias fragillimus. As with A. fragillimus, for the Recapture Creek critter we have part of one bone, and at least for this exercise I was working only from published illustrations with scale bars. And as with A. fragillimus, the choice of a reference taxon is not obvious, and the size estimates are all over the place, and some of them just aren’t that big.
It always amuses me when A. fragillimus comes up and people (well, trolls) accuse us of being big ole’ wet blankets that just don’t want to believe in 200-tonne sauropods. It amuses me because it’s wrong on so many levels. Believe me, when we have our sauropod fanboy hats on, we most definitely do want to believe in 200-tonne sauropods. That would rock. But when we put our scientist hats on, wanting and belief go right out the window. We have to take a cold, hard look at the data, and especially at its limitations.
Oh, the other moral is to go buy a tape measure, and use it. Sheesh!
Coda
As I said above, the obvious thing to do would be to just track down the bone and measure it. It does still exist, it’s in the BYU collections, and Brooks Britt has kindly offered to send along some measurements when he gets time. So we should have some real answers before long (and here they are). But I wanted to work through this example without them, to illustrate how much uncertainty creeps in when trying to estimate the size of a big sauropod from published images of a single partial bone.
Reference
